In my blog I share my learning curve about the 'new social learning'. I started with a focus on communities of practice, but there are many new forms of social learning emerging. I share personal experiences, articles and cases

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Sunday, January 08, 2006

Technology: How to choose an aggregator

Denham Grey in a discussion on CPsquare about web 2.0 and communities of practice pointed to a podcast on aggregators. It rightly supported my own learning process on RSS. I heard about RSS about a year ago and was really lazy in finding out how and what (and life kind of continues happily without it :)). Then my colleague showed me google reader and I copied all her feeds as well (lazy again) and I used it together with bloglines for reading blogs. Now I'm very happy with bloglines and not too happy with google reader. Bloglines links with my interest in following some blogs and forget to check google reader at times. At times there are so many things you can dig into!

The podcast talks about aggregators a a means of subscribing to RSS feeds. She explains why 2006 can be the year of the aggregator because for instance, it is possible to be informed when a colleague has added something on a project you're working on. There is a basic choice to be made between:* webbased readers, eg. bloglines, myyahoo, newaggregators* desktop client readers- to quickly scan what's going on eg. blogbridge is mentioned as a good one because it is java-based, open soure and designed by someone who understands collaboration and can be integrated with delicious.

It's interested that your learning process is very individual, but it can be supported by your community of practice if it coincides with others at the right time. And it can stimulate action and change, my uneasy feeling about google reader will now be transformed into action by trying blogbridge (combined with uploading my own feeds more consciously).